Michael Arrieta currently serves as the Founder and CEO of Garden City, a purpose-driven buyout holding company that has raised $40M of permanent capital to buy, grow, and forever-hold service companies across the Southeast. Once acquired, Garden City seeks to grow them through culture, technology and sales.

• The pressures in your life, it’s often it doesn’t make us who we are. It shows who we really are.  – John Marsh
• Somebody once told me in Cutco, your true colors show when your back’s against the wall – Mike Arrieta
• Thank God for stuttering. My biggest prohibitor and deficit was my biggest blessing. – Mike Arrieta
• All that we did that seemed like it was going to destroy us, ended up being the same thing that God used to make us. – John Marsh
• I say every great season of my life started with meeting someone and so did every bad one. – John Marsh
• I said, if I only had 10 years to live, what would I do? – Mike Arrieta
• We’re trying to build a Christian Berkshire Hathaway.  – Mike Arrieta
• That’s the biggest factor for us is we buy with no intention of ever selling – Mike Arrieta
• So, we buy companies, grow them, hold them forever. We look to come alongside the management team, and we focus on three things, culture tech, and sales.- Mike Arrieta
• There’s two kinds of focuses, one extracts value and the other adds value.- Mike Arrieta
• Small businesses don’t say small on purpose.- Mike Arrieta
• I know everyone says culture eats strategy for breakfast. I don’t believe this, but I’ll say it because maybe part of me does believe it, sales eats everything for breakfast. – Mike Arrieta
•  The quality of your answers are directly relative to the quality of your questions.- John Marsh
• …can you think of three, four, five, 10 other people that you believe might see the same sort of value that you did? I would hyper-focus on referrals, even with raising $40 million. That’s the way it happened.- Mike Arrieta
• “There’s three Ms you gotta get right if you want your life to be amazing, who’s your master, what’s your mission, who you going to marry?” He said, “If you get those three right, everything else is going to be simple.” – Truett Cathy
• The other thing he told us, he said, “We don’t make people happy. We hire happy people.” – Truett Cathy

• Michael Arrieta – Garden City
• Generous Giving
• Praxxis
• Cutco
• Dell
• Docusign
• The Dream Giver by Bruce Wilkerson
• Giftology by John Ruhlin

What have you read that we should read?

• Excellence Wins by Horst Schulze
• Sacred Pace by Terry Looper

Who do you know that we should know?

• Brett Hagler of New Story Charity (podcast)

Where have you been that we should go?

• Kruger National Park in South Africa